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It should be ‘Joy in Books’, not ‘Joy of Books’

January 11, 2012 By Dan Thornton

A number of people have been sharing a cool video which features animated books moving around a Toronto bookstore. It’s named ‘The Joy of Books’, and it’s a well-made, enjoyable creation which is fun to watch, as you can now see:

But possibly as a result of the title, a few people are using it as an example of why print is in some way superior to an electronic version.

And that’s rubbish, quite frankly.

There are two elements of books that elicit joy:

What’s in the book
What surrounds the book

None of that is inherent to print, eReaders, parchment, hieroglyphics or any other transportation medium.

What’s in the book:

Amazing writing and art will bring someone joy. I’m happy reading William Gibson books in print or on my Kindle, and if he decided in the future that he would only inscribe his work into the trunks of trees, I’d be trying to find a way to fund a private forest in my back garden.

As long as the typeface is legible, and the art is clear, then the transportation of it matters not a jot. Possibly my last line of resistance was comics and graphic novels, but even in this case I’ve overcome my reservations about reading them electronically when I’ve been borrowing an iPad. And as always, great writing and art works.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t things that could be improved – reading a PDF on a Kindle can be frustrating when the text and font aren’t suited, but PDFs have always been the work of the devil regardless of how you’re forced to encounter them.

What surrounds the book:

Here’s where it gets more interesting. So the first aspect to transfer between formats is the social aspect. Reading to my son from a printed book or a Kindle doesn’t matter in terms of the benefit and enjoyment he gets from someone reading to him. Chatting about the book with other people isn’t diminished by a screen, and lending is a possibility now. In fact, electronically I can share Creative Commons books directly with friends around the globe, ensuring they can read the same ‘copy’ as me.

There are differences in the physical sensation. It’s not so much the turning on a page – the way buttons work to flick through a book on the Kindle is a pretty damn effective substitute. But particularly the smell of an aging book hasn’t been replicated electronically (Although it easily could). Not sure that’s a particularly great source of joy though – more an association that old paper quite often comes with great stories.

Then there are two tangible areas which reflect the hoarding of knowledge – the receiving of a book as a treasured gift, and resale value. The resale value of most books is negligible thanks to the massive inventory of mainstream paperbacks, so it really only applies to niche hardbacks.

And then we come to gifting – particularly if it’s a family heirloom or with handwritten notes. That’s the only area in which culturally it’s hard to put the same weighting on an electronic version, but that shift will undoubtedly happen to some extent, leaving either small inventories of the most popular gift choices in print editions, or print-on-demand for anything which isn’t in a classic gift choice.

Either way, the pleasure of the contents, the social aspect of sharing and discussing, and many of the other areas of enjoyment when it comes to literature are already present in electronic formats, and some of the others could be closely replicated. That’s why the joy is ‘in’ the book, not ‘of’ the book.

Recommending you check out a print magazine…

November 30, 2010 By Dan Thornton

I may have spent years suggesting that the print industry will decline in the face of digital abundance, but I’ve also long-suggested that niche print publishing is the logical future of dead trees.

Which is why Hacker Monthly is so cool.

Essentially it’s a curated selection of the top links voted to the top of Hacker News – which itself has long been a favourite user-voted site of mine. Leaning towards coders and programmers, Hacker News submissions can be “anything that gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity.”, and the organic growth of the site means that it sticks pretty closely to that, rather than slipping into trivial shock links (as happened to Digg a lot over the years).

Originally started as a side project, Hacker Monthly has become a 3,000-paid subscriber production, available in print, or as a digital download. And the promotion of it largely comes from hardcore digital people making a rare move in buying something in a print format…

The reason it works is that it’s a mix of crowd suggestion and editorial curation which has a big digital audience to convert a certain percentage into a payment model.

Or just because it’s cool.

(h/t ReadWriteWeb.)

Not writing about not comparing print and online audiences…

April 15, 2009 By Dan Thornton

I had an amazing response to my previous post, ‘Why it’s dangerous to compare print figures to website stats‘, including a good follow up post by Martin Belam, the invitation to repost and start contributing to the Online Journalism Blog, great comments from Dave, Neil and Andrew, and most impressively, Martin Lengeveld updated his original post with a link and details of my post.

Inspired by all of this, I’ve decided to take the undoubtedly risky approach of not only poking holes in the arguments of others, but to try and maybe answer some of them – but that proved more difficult than expected, (partly due to the epic victory of Chelsea in the Champions League game vs Liverpool last night)

Initially I started brainstorming measures that could be broadly equivalent with some work – could the effort of walking to a shop and paying for a print copy be judged equivalent to reading a website? Commenting? Subscribing via RSS?

But then I got hit by a far more fundamental question.

Why are we trying to compare print readers and online readers in the first place?

And it’s a serious question.

Because if you run a publishing business, you’re going to make judgements about print and online on revenue. And scale in both mediums is a byproduct of an advertising model based on number of eyeballs, usually within a target location/demographic, or from being able to attract flat rate advertisers by being able to claim the largest readership.

The actual scale itself doesn’t matter once we’re in the same ballpark and seeing trends in readership over a reasonable period?

Or am I missing something?

Or are we trying to find figures to justify editorial or marketing resource? Or refocus online media commentary?

Only when the reason for the measurement is clear is it going to be possible to try and devise a method for comparing ‘domestic print apples and global multimedia organges’ (quoting Mr Belam).

I’m actually heading off to a Twitter-based event called Aperitweat tonight, organised by good friend @tojulius, so I’m hoping great food and conversation will fuel something closer to a conclusion rather than more questions! (Apparently you can watch the event live on Ustream– I’ll be the scruffy one…)

And I’m also hoping to keep the brilliant contributions coming from Dave, Neil, Andrew, Paul Bradshaw and maybe Martin himself to produce something from my hopefully constructive criticism – and if not, perhaps just an agreement to never compare print and online audiences directly again?

Why it’s dangerous to compare print figures to website stats

April 14, 2009 By Dan Thornton

Although hardly newspaper/print apologists, both John Duncan and Martin Langeveld have posted interesting articles trying to compare the print/online split in newspaper readership in number terms. Duncan comes in with online having 17% of page impressions on Inksniffer using the Guardian as a case study, while Langeveld posts that only 3% of newspaper reading happens online.

While I totally agree that it’s easy to overestimate the online figures in comparison to print products, and both articles are good reality checks, I have to say that I think comparing print and online readerships directly in this way is equivalent to comparing the number of people who drive cars with the number of people with vowels in their name.

And touting the eventual figures is very dangerous.

For starters, the readership of print titles rests on research figures for average shared readership of titles. For instance, the metrics John Duncan quotes are:

From 2007:

Average daily UK uniques for Guardian website: 270576 (after discounting overseas readers etc).

Average UK sales of Guardian/Observer: 310788

But then the UK sales figures is multiplied by 3 to take into account shared readership, becoming 932,364, on figures available by the Guardian.

Meanwhile Langeveld refers to an engagement study from the Newspaper Association of America conducted in February 2006, based on 4594 respondents to a survey.

Now shared readership definitely happens, and without being able to actually see what people do, rather than what they claim, it’s impossible to be totally accurate.

But…

If you’re taking shared readership of print products into account, then surely you’d also need to factor in people reading newspaper website content without ever being logged as a visitor to the site?

That includes people blocking cookies, people using RSS, people reading reposts of newspaper content (Great example of the spread of multimedia news by Martin Belam by the way), people reading content via aggregation sites and site scrapers etc, etc.

And by the time you’ve taken into account all the vagaries of print readership figures (which aren’t a bad guide to something so difficult to measure), and then taken into account the vagaries of online measurement (Less inaccurate, but still pretty fairly vague), and using data and research from 2+ years ago (But that’s probably the most recent readily available) it starts to be apparent that quoting a an exact figure is pretty irrelevant – especially when some people will undoubtedly take it as gospel.

After all, two years ago, Facebook didn’t have 200 million users, Twitter had just launched, there was no iPhone, there was less broadband penetration in the UK, there hadn’t been events like earthquakes or Mumbai to highlight realtime information, etc, etc.

And there’s a big elephant in the news room: Whoever said that print newspaper readers were guaranteed to only be getting their online news from newspapers?

I can get digital news on my mobile or my PC, via text,audio or video, and via social networks, blogs, websites, link aggregators, RSS, podcasts, videocasts, and from global sources. Whether or not print titles are only seeing a small percentage of their print readership visiting them online is less relevant, than how many of those readers are getting news content online from any source.

So what can you do?

When it comes to looking at the situation now and for the future, the numbers are far less important than looking at data trends. I’d much rather base a theory or business strategy on a few years of data showing a rise in one area and a fall in another. The numbers are rough guides to point towards when the trends are in the same area, but that’s all.

Just to reiterate, I don’t want to criticise John and Martin for doing what is a useful, if flawed, exercise to highlight caution in assuming that online readership is bigger than it really is, or that print readership is smaller than you might think. As I tried to comment on the Nieman Labs site (sadly it vanished into cyberspace after I submitted it), it’s the way the information is being presented that worries me.

Viral of the wrong sort – consumed by colds!

January 10, 2009 By Dan Thornton

My son has only just started going to nursery, but has already picked up the first of the inevitable stream of colds he’ll get over the next year or so – and not only is he suffering, but he’s kindly passed it to both parents!

Hence a bit of a lack of blogging, but some interesting conversations with his mum about how how we think he’ll consume information and entertainment in the future.

For instance, her belief that children’s books in print will be just as prevalent in 5 years time because he’s already turning the pages of his books.

My belief that might not be the case, because he might not be ‘turning the page of a book’, but simply trying to interact with something in front of him.

I’m not suggesting either of us is necessarily right – but it’s interesting comparing the different views – me as the web geek who spends his work and spare time talking about blogs and Twitter, and her as the more practical mother who only gets a few minutes each day to catch up with friends via Facebook and a couple of mothering messageboards.

When the likes of Oprah recommend something like a Kindle, there’s definitely big changes coming, whether or not the eventual mass-adopted solution looks anything like what’s out there.

Having said that, I’m currently indulging in more dead treee reading – re-reading Communities Dominate Brands: Business and Marketing Challenges for the 21st Century and thinking about smartphones and convergence. If you haven’t read the book, it’s worth catching up with the blog as well, at Communities Dominate Brands.

Right, back to the group huddled on the sofa sniffling…